IRAQ: An Illegal War

March 21, 2003

By suppressing the fact that the ongoing war against Iraq is illegal, the mainstream media misrepresents the nature of the Anglo-American aggression and the fundamental reason why it is opposed by so many nations around the world.

PARIS, France – By ignoring the important legal questions that surround the U.S.-led war against Iraq, the mainstream media has deceived Americans about the legitimacy of the military aggression aimed at removing the regime in Baghdad. It is, however, precisely because the war against Iraq is considered by governments to be illegal that law-abiding nations have refused to support the ill-advised military effort.

As U.S. and British forces entered the demilitarized zone (DMZ) between Kuwait and Iraq, violating the Security Council resolution that established the zone, legal experts pointed out that military action taken to overthrow the Baghdad regime is illegal. As the hour of attack approached, 31 Canadian professors of international law signed an open letter pointing out the illegality of military action against Iraq. A U.S.-British attack “would be a fundamental breach of international law and would seriously threaten the integrity of the international legal order that has been in place since the end of the Second World War,” the letter said. “Illegal action by the U.S. and its allies would simply return us to an international order based on imperial ambition and coercive force,” the letter said.

Even as U.S. and British troops moved into forward battle positions on Iraq’s southern border during a blinding sandstorm on March 19, the foreign ministers of France, Russia, and Germany continued to argue in the UN Security Council for the legal and peaceful alternative to the “logic of war.” Their U.S. and British counterparts, however, stayed away from the session having already abandoned their efforts to provide international legal cover for the long-planned military aggression.

The jaundiced pro-war mass media in the United States has willfully misrepresented the fundamental reasons for France’s resistance to war mongering against Iraq. Gerard Errera, French ambassador to London explained the basis of the French position: “There are no ulterior motives to France's position. We have deeply held convictions. At the heart of them lies the notion that for any action by the international community to be efficient, it has to be legitimate; and that to be legitimate, it has to be based on the respect for international law.”

Only “respect for the law can legitimize the use of force,” French Foreign Minister Dominique de Villepin said. “Respect for the law should be applied in all circumstances, and even more so when it involves the most serious decision, to use force.”

“Would France consider military action taken against Iraq without the authority of the UN Security Council as aggression?” I asked François Rivasseau, spokesman for the French foreign ministry, at a press conference on March 17. Avoiding the term “aggression”, Rivasseau said that any attack on Iraq, lacking the authority of the UN, “would be illegitimate,” adding that this position had not changed since being stated by French president Jacques Chirac on March 10. Later, Rivasseau said that while the French government considered a U.S.-led invasion of Iraq as illegal, it could not call it “aggression.”

France’s opposition to war was “inspired by the primacy of international law,” Chirac said on March 18. Chirac appealed for respect for international law and called on the international community “to preserve the unity of the Security Council by staying in the framework set by Resolution 1441.”

“There is no justification for a unilateral decision to resort to force…Iraq today does not represent an immediate threat that justifies an immediate war,” he said.

“If there is a friend or somebody I dearly love, and if you see that they are going down the wrong path, and if you feel, at least, that that is the case, then friendship demands that we tell that friend, that we warn him,” Chirac, said in an interview on CNN. “I am telling my American friends: Beware; be careful. Think it over seriously before you make an act that is not necessary and that can be very dangerous.”

Chirac’s popularity rating hit a record high due to his opposition to war on Iraq, according to a poll published on March 18. Some 74 percent of those questioned had a positive opinion of the French president, up from 61 percent in February, with only 22 percent held a negative view, according to a Louis Harris poll. On the other hand, 75 percent of the French population blame the U.S. president personally for “the problems created by America,” while only 15 percent faults the U.S. in general.

Europeans are extremely hostile to the U.S. president and his war policy. “Overwhelming majorities [in Europe] disapprove of President Bush's foreign policy,” said Andrew Kohut, director of the Pew center. “Western Europeans mostly see Bush as the problem, rather than America more generally.”

The Pew poll conducted in eight European nations revealed how differently Americans view the war from their traditional allies. Fifty-nine percent of Americans support a war to remove Saddam Hussein, while only 39 percent of Britons favor military action and the other seven nations showing even less support. As a result of Bush’s warmongering, only two European nations - Poland and Britain – now hold favorable views of America. In the other European nations polled the majority is anti-U.S.

Poles, who have long held positive views of the United States, were 79 percent in favor of the U.S. last year. Today, only 50 percent of the Polish population is favorable of the United States. Last year, 75 percent of Britons had a generally positive view of the United States. This year, only 48 percent have that positive view, while negative views have more than doubled. The Spanish, who are extremely opposed to war with Iraq, showed a 74 percent unfavorable opinion of the U.S.

NO LEGAL BASIS

Russian Foreign Minister Igor Ivanov said there is no legal basis for the war against Iraq. “We [the Russian government] believe the use of force against Iraq, especially with reference to previous resolutions of the U.N. Security Council, has no grounds, including legal grounds,” Ivanov said. “Resolution 1441, to which so many references are made, does not give anyone the right to use force automatically,” he said.

“Exactly when the prospect of Iraq's disarmament became more or less likely, problems which have nothing to do with Resolution 1441 and other UN decisions on Iraq were put at the forefront,” Ivanov said at a Security Council session on March 19. “None of these decisions grants the right to use force against Iraq sidestepping the UN Charter,” Ivanov said. “Not one of them authorizes the violent overthrow of the leadership of a sovereign state.”

Gennady Seleznyov, Russia’s parliamentary Speaker, said an attack would cause the world to consider that “the U.S. is a terrorist state that can only be dealt with in the Hague tribunal.”

According to legal experts, there are only two cases that would allow the U.S. to use force against Iraq: in self-defense, or with the express authorization of the UN Security Council exercising its powers under the UN charter. Iraq has not attacked the U.S., the U.K. or their allies, nor is there any evidence that it is about to do so, therefore any arguments based on self-defense fail, experts say. While the Bush national security strategy calls for pre-emptive attacks, the use of armed force in such circumstances is contrary to international law.

Legal experts argue that the unjustified invasion of Iraq constitutes aggression. “Aggression is the use of armed forces by a State against the sovereignty, territorial integrity or political independence of another State, or in any other manner inconsistent with the Charter of the UN,” according to the UN definition.

The UN Charter forbids countries to wage war except in self-defense or when authorized by the UN Security Council to preserve or restore international peace. The United States cannot say it is acting in self-defense unless it is clear it is about to be attacked by Iraq. “That armed attack has to be at least imminent. There has to be evidence of a clear and present danger of such an armed attack,” according to Irwin Cotler, one of Canada’s best-known experts on international law.

Without a UN resolution authorizing the use of force, legal experts argue that President George W. Bush and those who have conspired with him are in fact committing aggression, which is a crime against peace, the most serious war crime under the U.S.-written Nuremberg Charter. If the allied invasion of Iraq were deemed aggression, the U.S. and British political leaders responsible for planning the aggression could be tried and punished for a crime against peace, according to the International Law Commission (ILC).

Cover-Up: The 9-11 Commission

July 10, 2003

The controlled media and the seriously compromised 9-11 commission are seemingly complicit in concealing the truth - while writing the history - for the worst terrorist attack in American history. The truth about the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 is unlikely to emerge from the politically appointed National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States. The integrity of the so-called “independent” 9-11 commission is compromised by, among other things, the connections of its staff and key members to the globalist Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), the White House, and domestic and foreign intelligence agencies.

The mainstream media has reported that the commission’s investigation has been hampered by the failure of the executive branch agencies, especially the Pentagon and the Justice Department, to provide requested documents and testimony. The heads of the commission recently reported that federal agencies under the president’s control were not cooperating quickly or fully. The commission also complained about the fact that, like Iraq, the U.S. government requires an agency “minder” to be present during interviews with officials. The commission’s chairman Thomas H. Kean, the former Republican governor of New Jersey, said the presence of an agency “minder” amounted to “intimidation” of the witnesses.

The fact that key members and staff of the commission belong to globalist groups and secret societies that have un-American agendas has not been reported in the controlled press. Kean and vice-chairman Lee H. Hamilton, a former Democratic congressman from Indiana, are both long-standing members of the CFR, as is commission member Jamie Gorelick and Philip Zelikow, its executive director. Zelikow is also a member of the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS), an appendage of British intelligence. Members of the CFR, IISS, and the Yale secret society Skull and Bones are found like threads running through the cloth of 9-11.

For example, Peter G. Peterson, chairman of the CFR and the Federal Reserve Bank of New York announced that his Blackstone Group had purchased, in October 2000, the mortgage on 7 World Trade Center, the 47-story building built by Larry Silverstein in 1987. Silverstein is the person who obtained 99-year leases on the twin towers shortly before 9-11 and who insured the property and its future income against terrorism. He is seeking some $7.2 billion claiming the attacks were two separate events.

WTC 7 mysteriously collapsed at 5:25 p.m. on 9-11, in what appears to have been a controlled demolition. John Wholihan, a firefighter with Rescue 5 from Staten Island was near WTC 7 when it collapsed. Wholihan told me that he heard “many explosions” just before the building collapsed neatly within the perimeter of its foundation. Silverstein received some $441 million in insurance money for WTC 7 although the cause of the collapse remains officially unexplained.

Peterson co-founded the Blackstone Group with Stephen A. Schwarzman, a member of the CFR and Skull and Bones. Both George W. Bush and his father are also Skull and Bones, as is John F. Kerry, the Democrat presidential candidate. Commission spokesman Alvin Felzenberg and commission member Fred Fielding served on the Bush transition team in 2001. Felzenberg was executive director of the President's Commission on the Federal Appointments Process.

Most of the commission’s work is done behind closed doors; it has only held three open sessions. The third session, “Terrorism, Al Qaeda, and the Muslim World” on July 9, concluded with Steven Emerson, the self-styled terrorism “expert” whose anti-Muslim rants appear often in the controlled press, particularly on Fox News and NBC News, where he is a consultant. The controlled media generally accepts the government’s version of 9-11 events as doctrine ignoring the numerous contradictions and unanswered questions.

CHENEY IN CHARGE

Intriguing testimony was heard during the commission’s second open session on May 23 when officials from the Department of Transportation and the Air Force appeared.

While two planes had already smashed into the WorldTradeCenter and with two other rogue aircraft - one headed for Washington - being tracked by civil and military aviation authorities, President George W. Bush continued to calmly read and discuss a story of a goat with school children in Florida. Rather than leaving to take charge of the national emergency, Bush continued to read for another thirty minutes. The only explanation for this bizarre behavior is that Bush had anticipated the event and knew it was being controlled by Vice President Dick Cheney.

The testimony of Secretary of Transportation Norman Mineta on May 23 about Cheney’s actions is revealing. Mineta said he arrived at the Presidential Emergency Operating Center (PEOC) at 9:20 a.m. where he observed the Vice President taking charge:

Mineta: There was a young man who had come in and said to the vice president, “The plane is 50 miles out…The plane is 30 miles out.” And when it got down to, “The plane is 10 miles out,” the young man also said to the vice president, “Do the orders still stand?” And the vice president turned and whipped his neck around and said, “Of course the orders still stand. Have you heard anything to the contrary?” Well, at the time I didn’t know what all that meant. And…

Hamilton: The flight you’re referring to is the…

Mineta: The flight that came into the Pentagon.

After some discussion of whether Cheney’s orders meant to shoot down the hijacked aircraft, it was clearly stated on the record that there were no such orders to do so, which raises the obvious question of what “the orders” were:

Hamilton: And so there was no specific order there to shoot that plane down.

Mineta: No, sir.

Hamilton: But there were military planes in the air in position to shoot down commercial aircraft.

Mineta: That’s right. The planes had been scrambled, I believe, from Otis at that point.

Mineta is referring to two F-15 fighter jets from the 102 Fighter Wing at Otis Air National Guard Base, near Cape Cod, Mass. As the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) responded to the hijackings, these planes reportedly flew to New York City in order to intercept the two planes that had been hijacked after leaving Boston’s LoganAirport. There are numerous unanswered questions about the actions taken by NORAD aircraft and why they were unable to intercept any of the hijacked passenger planes.

HOW FAST IS FAST?

The two F-15s were scrambled at Otis ANGB at 8:46 a.m. as the first tower at the WorldTradeCenter was struck. By 8:52 they were airborne and according to one of the pilots flying at full speed to New York City. “This looks like the real thing,” Lt. Col. Timothy Duffy was told as he jammed the F-15’s throttles into afterburner and the two planes flew the 153 miles to New York City at “supersonic speeds,” according to an Aviation Week & Space Technology (AW) article of June 3, 2002. “It just seemed wrong. I just wanted to get there. I was in full-blower all the way,” Duffy said. The F-15 Eagle is capable of flying 1,875 mph (Mach 2.5+) and has a range of 3,000 nautical miles. At full speed the Otis F-15s should have reached New York City in about 5 minutes, by 8:58 a.m. The armed fighter jets would then have been in position to intercept the second hijacked plane, which struck the south tower at about 9:02 a.m.

The F-15s from Otis were “cocked and loaded, and even had extra gas on board,” according to Northeast Air Defense Sector (NEADS) commander Col. Robert K. Marr. I spoke to Air Force Capt. Wes Ticer, spokesman for Air Combat Command, who said an F-15 at “full power” reaches 1,875 mph, although its velocity varies depending on the plane’s weight and altitude.

Col. Alan Scott (Ret.) presented NORAD’s timeline to the commission on May 23. In this timeline the F-15 fighter jets are said to be 71 miles, “about eight minutes out,” from the WorldTradeCenter at 9:02 a.m. when the second tower was struck. This indicates the fighters had traveled only 83 miles in some nine minutes, flying about 550 mph (Mach 0.9). Scott told the commission that the interceptors jets, which would have been flying at less than 30 percent of their full speed, were “going very fast” - and nobody questioned it.

VIGILANT GUARDIAN

Maj. Gen. Larry Arnold, commander of the Continental U.S. NORAD Region (CONAR) at Tyndall AFB, Fla., was informed by Marr about the suspected hijacked aircraft shortly after 8:40 a.m. Arnold, who then headed the 1st Air Force for Air Combat Command, was in Air Operations Center preparing for another day of a major NORAD counter-terrorism exercise that morning called “Vigilant Guardian.”

The National Reconnaissance Office (NRO) in Chantilly, Va., a branch of the military intelligence community that operates the nation’s spy satellites was engaged in a similar exercise in which a passenger jet leaving the nearby DullesAirport would crash into the NRO building.

“I told him to scramble; we'll get clearances later,” Arnold said. On Sept. 11, a time-consuming bureaucratic procedure was required before scrambling defensive interceptor jets. FAA officials had to contact the National Military Command Center (NMCC) and request Pentagon air support. The NMCC then had to call NORAD's command center and ask about availability of aircraft and finally approval had to come from the Defense Secretary - Donald H. Rumsfeld – before launching fighters. This time-consuming procedure was the result of a Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Instruction dated June 1, 2001.

CANADIAN COMMANDERS?

However, rather than getting approval from Rumsfeld, two Canadian officers, serving as NORAD directors on the morning of 9-11, approved the fighters’ launch according to the Aviation Week article. Capt. Michael H. Jellinek, a British-born Canadian officer was serving as NORAD command director and another Canadian, Maj. Gen. Eric A. Findley was NORAD’s director of operations. Findley, positioned at NORAD headquarters in Colorado’s Cheyenne Mountain Air Force Station for the Vigilant Guardian exercise “quickly approved the fighters’ launch,” according to the article. While NORAD has been faulted for its failures on 9-11, it should be noted that it was the Canadian officer Jellinek who was NORAD’s “director of plans, requirements and readiness” on Sept. 11, 2001.

I filed a written request with NORAD asking for clarification of who was in the chain-of-command and who actually approved the launching of the fighter jets on 9-11 and why foreign officers were making decisions during a national crisis in the United States. A NORAD spokesman said that an answer would not be readily available.

A year after 9-11, Arnold told ABC News that when he heard of the hijacking, “The first thing that went through my mind was, ‘Is this part of the exercise? Is this some kind of screw-up?’” In a 23 September 2001 interview with Mike Taibbi of Dateline NBC, Arnold said the F-15s from Otis were travelling about 1,200 mph:

ARNOLD: In the meantime, our pilots were coming at about 1.5 Mach, which is, you know, somewhere -11 or 12 hundred miles an hour.

Because of the different reports concerning the speed of the Otis F-15s bound for New York City, I sent a written inquiry to NORAD requesting clarification of their velocity. Sgt. Gary Carpenter said that “based on the nature of the questions” NORAD’s responses would take considerable time.

The Secretary of Defense was supposed to approve the launching of interceptor jets. However, while the vice president was in the PEOC monitoring the approach of the aircraft that struck the Pentagon, Rumsfeld told ABC News’ Sam Donaldson shortly after 9-11 that he had been completely unaware of the approaching plane:

Donaldson: On Tuesday I am told the FAA notified someone in the Pentagon that there was a rogue plane apparently headed toward Washington. But you didn't know it, am I correct? -- until it hit?

Rumsfeld: I was in the Pentagon and felt the shock of the attack, and…

Donaldson: What did you think it was?

Rumsfeld: A bomb? I had no idea. I looked out the window and raced down the corridors till the smoke was too bad and then went outside, and saw the devastation and talked to an eyewitness who told me that he had seen an aircraft plow into the Pentagon between the first and second floor.

Donaldson: Could you believe it?

Rumsfeld: No. It's just -- it was a sight -- just amazing.

Richard Ben Veniste of the commission asked NORAD’s Major General Craig McKinley if the “concept of terrorists using airplanes as weapons was not something which was unknown to the U.S. intelligence community on September 10, 2001?” McKinley did not answer the question directly saying, “I’d like the intelligence community to address that.” When Ben Veniste read a list of attempts to crash planes into buildings, including the White House, McKinley said NORAD was “not postured” for what occurred on 9-11. “Threats of killing hostages or crashing [planes] were left to the script writers,” McKinley said.

Indeed, in early 2000 a writer working for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox TV wrote a screenplay that was an uncanny premonition of what occurred on Sept. 11, 2001. In the Murdoch film, a passenger airliner was hijacked remotely by a computer hacker and flown into the WorldTradeCenter. The pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen, a spin off of the X-Files, was broadcast on March 4, 2001 on Fox TV.

In the Murdoch-financed film, the ground-based staff of a small Washington-based independent newspaper is able to prevent the plane from hitting the tower at the last second by restoring manual control to the pilots, who are then able to avoid hitting the building by mere feet. The “hijackers” in the film were corrupt elements in the U.S. Air Force and Defense Department who “hacked” into the plane’s navigation system in order to commit a horrible “terrorist” act in order to promote weapons sales and wars against “crack-pot dictators around the world begging to be smart bombed.”

I spoke with Andrew Butcher, a spokesman for Fox TV, who said that The Lone Gunmen was produced and financed by Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. The commission’s spokesman Felzenberg has also written articles for Rupert Murdoch’s magazine, the Weekly Standard. Murdoch, the media magnate, openly used his 175 newspapers and Fox television network to promote the war policy of President George W. Bush and British Prime Minister Tony Blair. The left-leaning Guardian (UK) wrote in February: “You have got to admit that Rupert Murdoch is one canny press tycoon because he has an unerring ability to choose editors across the world who think just like him. How else can we explain the extraordinary unity of thought in his newspaper empire about the need to make war on Iraq?”

Skull & Bones, 9-11, and the Bogus "War on Terror"

September 14, 2003

The Bush administration, which blocked an open inquest into the terrorism of 9-11, has used the terror attacks as its “new Pearl Harbor” to launch costly and unjust wars of aggression. This raises the obvious question: “Are they complicit?”

Two years after the terror attacks of 9-11, total secrecy continues to surround the official investigation of the crime. Government officials have exploited the attacks – and the fear they created – to wage a global “war on terrorism” and undermine freedom and prosperity in America. An un-elected president and a cabal of appointed officials, all extreme Zionists, who opposed any open investigation into the attacks have ruthlessly employed them as a pretext to launch long-planned and unjust invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, at great expense to the U.S. taxpayer.

After President George Walker Bush requested an additional $87 billion from Congress and declared it the “duty” of western nations to assist in “rolling back the terrorist threat to civilization” in Iraq, the Financial Times (FT) of London said Bush’s “rose-tinted and information-deficient analysis should be rejected.

“To call this a mess is to understate the matter,” FT said about the chaos and violence in Iraq. “It is now beyond reasonable doubt that the present set-up cannot and will not work.”

WORLD WAR IV

R. James Woolsey, a former Director of Central Intelligence, calls the war on terror “World War IV” and said recently that “we will be in this war for many years, quite probably for decades.” Woolsey told the Royal Institute of International Affairs that three movements, all Islamic, are “essentially at war with the west, with modernity, with western Europe and the United States and our allies.” The enemies, Woolsey said, are “the fascist” and “anti-Semitic” regimes of Syria, Libya, and Iraq, “the mullahs in Tehran,” and “Al Qaeda and its supporters.”

For historians, the war on terrorism is the manifestation and realization of the “clash of civilizations” predicted 10 years ago by Yale scholar Samuel Huntington in a much-ballyhooed 1993 article published in the Council on Foreign Relations’ (CFR) prestigious journal Foreign Affairs. (Huntington’s subsequent book was entitled The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order.) What Huntington failed to mention, however, is the most obvious cause for the “clash” between western and Islamic civilizations -- oil. By 2010 the Muslim world will control as much as 60 percent of the world’s oil production and 95 percent of remaining global oil export capacity, according to Britain’s former environment minister, Michael Meacher.

“WAR ON TERRORISM IS BOGUS”

In a recent article entitled “This war on terrorism is bogus” in the Guardian (UK), Meacher suggests that high-level U.S. officials were complicit in the 9-11 attacks and allowed a “new Pearl Harbor” to occur in order to put into effect a “blueprint for the creation of a global Pax Americana.” The document was drawn up and signed by the leading architects of the war on terrorism in the Bush administration. The “blueprint” Meacher refers to is a document entitled "Rebuilding America’s Defenses", written in September 2000 by a neo-conservative “think-tank,” the Project for the New American Century (PNAC). The PNAC document calls for large increases in the defense budget to transform the U.S. military into a global force. The plan calls for “a substantial American force presence in the Gulf,” among other things, which it says, “transcends the issue of the regime of Saddam Hussein.”

The people involved in the PNAC, and those for whom it was drawn up, are the leading war hawks of the Bush administration: Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, Paul Wolfowitz, Jeb Bush, and I. Lewis Libby. The project includes key U.S. supporters of the extreme right-wing Israeli Likud Party, including the Lithuanian-born historian and former dean of Yale, Donald Kagan, and his two sons, Fred and Robert, William Kristol of the Weekly Standard, and the Orthodox Jewish rabbi Dov Solomon Zakheim, the current Comptroller and Chief Financial Officer of the Dept. of Defense.

Nearly all of the PNAC participants have come out of one of two elite academic institutions: YaleUniversity or John’s Hopkins Nitze School of Advance International Studies.

Zakheim, whose place of birth is not given in Who’s Who, has strong ties to Britain, where he was educated and lived for many years. Zakheim comes from a Zionist family and his father reportedly grew up in the “same small Polish town as Yitzhak Shamir” and “numbered Menachem Begin among his closest friends.” Begin and Shamir are two of the most extreme Likud leaders in Israeli history.

“Others warn of a ‘cabal’ or ‘conspiracy’ of mostly Jewish ‘kosher conservatives’ who have ‘hijacked’ the government even as they secretly serve the interests of Israel’s Likud Party,” Tanenhaus wrote. “There are rumors of a ‘shadow government,’ being run from Wolfowitz’s office, which is said to have usurped intelligence operations from the CIA.”

Perle is one of the founding members of the PNAC. Veteran journalist John Pilger wrote about Perle: “I interviewed Perle when he was advising Reagan, and when he spoke about ‘total war’, I mistakenly dismissed him as mad,” Pilger wrote. “He recently used the term again in describing America's ‘war on terror’. ‘No stages,’ he said. ‘This is total war. We are fighting a variety of enemies. There are lots of them out there. All this talk about first we are going to do Afghanistan, then we will do Iraq... this is entirely the wrong way to go about it. If we just let our vision of the world go forth, and we embrace it entirely and we don't try to piece together clever diplomacy, but just wage a total war... our children will sing great songs about us years from now.’”

“A POLITICAL MYTH”

The “global war on terrorism,” Meacher says, “has the hallmarks of a political myth propagated to pave the way for a wholly different agenda – the U.S. goal of world hegemony, built around securing by force command over the oil supplies required to drive the whole project.” The “conventional explanation,” that the United States retaliated against the Taliban regime and al-Qaeda in Afghanistan because of the 9-11 attacks and then extended the war against terrorism to Iraq, “does not fit all the facts,” Meacher wrote. “The truth may be a great deal murkier."

"It is clear the U.S. authorities did little or nothing to pre-empt the events of 9-11,” Meacher wrote, despite the fact “that at least 11 countries provided advance warning to the U.S. of the 9-11 attacks.” Meacher cites the former U.S. federal prosecutor, John Loftus, who said: “The information provided by European intelligence services prior to 9-11 was so extensive that it is no longer possible for either the CIA or FBI to assert a defense of incompetence.” Were U.S. air security operations “deliberately stood down on September 11?” Meacher asks. “If so, why, and on whose authority?”

Meacher lists documented evidence that the FBI and high officials in the Bush administration actually prevented the capture of known terrorists. As whistle-blowing FBI agent Robert Wright told ABC News (Dec. 19, 2002) – FBI headquarters wanted no arrests.

“None of this assembled evidence,” Meacher wrote, “is compatible with the idea of a real, determined war on terrorism. The catalogue of evidence does, however, fall into place when set against the PNAC blueprint,” Meacher says. “From this it seems that the so-called ‘war on terrorism’ is being used largely as bogus cover for achieving wider U.S. strategic geopolitical objectives.”

Meacher’s comments are noteworthy because they are the first time a member of British Prime Minister Tony Blair’s cabinet has openly questioned the validity of the “war on terrorism” and suggested that high officials in the U.S. government were in some way complicit in the 9-11 attacks. Meacher’s observations lend credence to the conclusions of researchers like Walter E. Davis, PhD, at KentStateUniversity, who recently published a paper with 22 points which, he says, “suggest that the most plausible explanation of events is that the Bush administration was complicit in the terrorist attacks.

“This should be a national and international scandal,” Davis wrote. “What is being discovered will shock many people, which is one of the reasons for deliberate corporate media cover-up.”

POISONING PEACE

The Anglo-American invasion and occupation of Iraq is counter-productive, according to Sen. Robert C. Byrd (D-WV): “Our military action in Iraq has forged a caldron of contempt for America, a dangerous brew that may poison the efforts of peace throughout the Middle East and result in the rapid invigoration of worldwide terrorism,” Byrd wrote in the Washington Post on August 26.

“As so many warned this administration before it launched its misguided war on Iraq, there is evidence that our crackdown in Iraq is likely to convince 1,000 new Bin Ladens to plan other horrors,” Byrd told the Senate on May 21, “Instead of damaging the terrorists, we have given them new fuel for their fury.”

A day after the U.N. headquarters in Baghdad was bombed, Jessica Stern of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government wrote in the New York Times: “America has taken a country that was not a terrorist threat and turned it into one.”

THE ARCHITECTURAL LEVEL

If officials of the Bush administration were complicit in the attacks, as Davis and Meacher suggest, there would have to be a secret network that connects the planners at the highest levels of government. There are a few secret organizations to which key high-level government officials belong, for example, the Council on Foreign Relations and The Order of Skull and Bones of Yale University. President George H.W. Bush is a member of both. Among fellow “Bonesmen” the elder Bush is known as “Magog.”

Several of the highest U.S. officials are members of organizations connected to foreign intelligence agencies, such as the British-based Royal Institute of International Affairs and the International Institute of Strategic Studies (IISS). Dr. James G. Roche, for example, the civilian secretary of the U.S. Air Force and Army belongs to the IISS. Roche was the man in charge of the U.S. Air Force and its strategic air defense systems on September 11, 2001.

THE ILLUMINATI

In his booklet 9-11: The Great Illusion, George Humphrey says “the Illuminati” were behind the terror attacks and have used fear to push forward their New World Order agenda. “The events of 9-11 were the classic set up using the Hegelian principle,” Humphrey says, of creating a Thesis and Anti-thesis conflict in order to produce a Synthesis, which results in the desired outcome for the highest-level planners.

Speaking to the nation on September 7, President Bush implied that a permanent change in American society had resulted from the terror attacks of 9-11: “And for America,” Bush said, “there will be no going back to the era before September the 11th, 2001 – to false comfort in a dangerous world.”

“The Illuminati have been organized for centuries, and have control of our economy, culture, and political organizations,” Humphrey wrote. “They are behind a vast majority of the wars and revolutions, and are behind the events of September 11.” Humphrey, however, does not name the suspected “Illuminati” culprits.

SKULL & BONES

If the “war against terrorism” is indeed creating more terror, and if the same people and agencies have actually supported both sides of the so-called “war,” it can be said that the Hegelian principle is being applied.

The Bush administration’s current foes in the “war on terrorism” were once good friends. George W. Bush and the Bin Laden family have been friends and business partners. The Bin Laden family financed Bush’s first business enterprise. This connection and the history of covert U.S. assistance for the Moslem resistance fighters in Afghanistan after the Soviet occupation and the criminal regime of Saddam Hussein in Iraq suggest the Hegelian principle has been used by the highest-level planners to create the “war on terror.”

A detailed explanation of how the Anglo-American Establishment has employed the Hegelian principle to influence American society and guide U.S. foreign policy during the 20th Century is described in detail in the late Antony C. Sutton’s book, America’s Secret Establishment, which focuses on the most powerful of Yale University’s secret senior-year societies: The Order of Skull & Bones. Sutton’s book is unique in its analysis of the political influence of “The Order” and provides the names of the organization’s membership from its creation at Yale in 1833 until 1985.

President George W. Bush, his father, and his grandfather, Prescott Sheldon Bush, were all “tapped” to be among the 15 “Bonesmen” during their final year at Yale. No fewer than 6 members of the Bush family, 9 from the Cheney clan, and 15 from the Walker’s have been inducted into this most secretive of Yale’s senior societies. It is important to note that, unlike other college fraternities, Yale’s senior societies are geared to post-collegiate life. According to Sutton and others, “The Order” has controlled YaleUniversity for over 100 years and is a “decision-making core” at the center of a network that includes the Council on Foreign Relations, Bilderberg, and The Trilateral Commission. “A secret society within a secret society” is how Sutton described the role of The Order.

Already in 1873, Yale scholars reported that Skull & Bones “have obtained control of Yale.” Since 1871, the Yale Presidency has been “almost a fiefdom for The Order,” according to Sutton.

The Order is also said to exercise great influence within the CIA. “Yale has influenced the CIA more than any other university, giving the CIA the atmosphere of a class reunion,” Gaddis Smith, professor of history at Yale, said. And “Bonesmen” are foremost among the “spooks” at the agency, according to Smith. President George H.W. Bush (Director of Central Intelligence 1976-77) is one of many “Bonesmen” to have held senior positions at the CIA.

“The synthesis sought by the Establishment is called the New World Order,” Sutton wrote in 1984. The elder Bush first articulated the need for “a new world order” as he waged war against Iraq in 1991.

“In the Hegelian system conflict is essential,” Sutton wrote. “This conflict of opposites is essential to bring about change. Today this process can be identified…where 'change' is promoted and 'conflict management' is termed the means to bring about this change.”

“Historically, operations of The Order have concentrated on society, how to change society in a specific manner towards a specific goal: a New World Order,” Sutton wrote in the early 1980’s. “The activities of The Order are directed towards changing our society, changing the world, to bring about a New World Order,” he wrote. “This will be a planned order with heavily restricted individual freedom, without Constitutional protection, without national boundaries or cultural distinction.”

The Order of Skull & Bones is “the elite of the elite” of Yale’s secret societies. At any given time some 600 members of The Order are probably alive. Skull & Bones and Yale’s other secret societies serve as “recruiting grounds” for the highest levels of government, intelligence, law, and finance.

I asked Alexandra Robbins, author of Secrets of the Tomb, a recent book about Skull & Bones, if she thought “The Order” has an inordinate amount of influence within the U.S. government or the intelligence agencies. “Four out of the nine current presidential candidates are Yalies,” Robbins said. “Three of them are Yale secret society men. I think that says a lot.” Presidential candidate Sen. John Forbes Kerry is also a “Bonesman.” The third is likely to be Sen. Joseph Lieberman.

“Skull & Bones is not simply a microcosmic subset of a wider American elite, it is the top of the pile and in the driver’s seat,” Andrei Navrozov, Yale graduate and author of The Gingerbread Race, wrote. “These people run the country,” he said. “They are responsible for what goes on. They should be known so they can be held to account.”

“The ritual is not just silly,” Navrozov says about the Skull & Bones secret and bizarre initiation ritual, which involves a symbolic death and rebirth as a “Knight” of The Order. “It is like a black mass,” he said. “Not unlike some Masonic ceremonies, it involves a compromising of individual dignity and thereby ensures a Bonesman’s loyalty to his society,” Claire Messud wrote about the Skull & Bones initiation rite in Observer Life Magazine (1994). “This loyalty is fiercely maintained: not one of the 2,289 initiated members of the society has ever spoken of his involvement.

“Certainly the ‘conspiracy’, inasmuch as there can be imagined to be one, is not that Bonesmen are everywhere in positions of power but that the outside world cannot recognize them as such,” Messud wrote. “The habit of secrecy and the concept of noblesse oblige of the Knights towards the Barbarians, born in undergraduate days, must of necessity have spilled over into the organizations and mechanisms that the Bonesmen have gone on to inhabit and to master,” Messud wrote. “When the organization mastered has become the entire nation, Navrozov’s paranoia ceases to seem quite as extreme.”

These are a few of the Yale graduates and “Bonesmen” (S&B) who have played key roles in the events of 9-11 and/or the war on terrorism:

President George W. Bush (S&B) Vice President Dick Cheney (Yale) Attorney General John Ashcroft (Yale) Samuel P. Huntington (Yale) – Author of the article "The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of the World Order" published in the CFR journal Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993.

James Woolsey (Yale) – Former Director of Central Intelligence and a leading advocate of war on terror.

New York Governor George Pataki (Yale): initiated the privatization of the World Trade Center, which was then leased to Larry Silverstein and the Israeli/Australian Frank Lowy.

Sen. Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.): a graduate of Yale and its law school and a key member of the closed congressional inquiry into the events of 9-11.

Stephen Allen Schwarzman (S&B): CEO and President of The Blackstone Group, which purchased the mortgage on WTC 7, controlled by Larry Silverstein, on October 17, 2000. Silverstein’s 47-story building mysteriously “self-demolished” at 5:25 p.m. on 9-11. Schwarzman’s partner and co-founder of the Blackstone Group is Peter G. Peterson, Chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and the Council on Foreign Relations. The Blackstone Group has a “strategic alliance” with Kissinger McLarty Associates. Henry Kissinger was Bush’s first choice to chair the 9-11 investigation.

L. Paul Bremer (Yale): a senior manager from Kissinger McLarty Associates and the appointed governor of occupied Iraq.

Oklahoma Democratic Senator David L. Boren (S&B): responsible for George Tenet being director of central intelligence (DCI), according to Bob Woodward (Yale, Book & Snake). After graduating from Yale, Woodward served as a liaison officer for the Task Force 157, an Office of Naval Intelligence operation. This ONI Task Force, using the top secret SR-1 channel, coordinated communiqués between the CIA, NSA, DIA, NSC, and the State Department. Woodward reportedly served in this capacity during the Israeli-Arab conflict of 1967.

Boren recommended Tenet to President-elect Bill Clinton (Yale) in 1992 to head the administration's transition team on intelligence. In 1995, Clinton named Tenet deputy CIA director and in 1997 appointed him DCI. In early 2001, Boren called President-elect Bush and urged him to keep Tenet on as CIA director. Boren told Bush to ask his father, which he did, and Tenet was kept as DCI.

James Harding of the Financial Times reported that Bush speaks with his father on a daily basis. “Their conversations are private,” Harding wrote, “But according to at least one person who knows the former president, the elder Mr. Bush is in a ‘high state of anxiety’ about the situation in Iraq and the possibility that his son could follow in his footsteps and lose his bid for re-election.”

In the book, Bush at War, Woodward presents a rather incredible dialogue, which he claims was the conversation between Boren and Tenet as they had breakfast together in Washington on the morning of 9-11:

"What are you worried about these days?" Boren asked Tenet that morning. "Bin Laden," Tenet replied, referring to terrorist leader Osama Bin Laden, an exiled Saudi who was living in Afghanistan and had developed the worldwide network al Qaeda, Arabic for "the Base." He was convinced that Bin Laden was going to do something big, he said.

"Oh, George!" Boren said. For the last two years he had been listening to his friend's concerns about Bin Laden. How could one private person without the resources of a foreign government be such a threat? he asked.

"You don't understand the capabilities and the reach of what they're putting together," Tenet said.

Suddenly, several of Tenet's security guards approached. They were not strolling. They were bolting toward the table.

Uh-oh, Boren thought.

"Mr. Director," one of them said, "there's a serious problem."

"What is it?" Tenet asked, indicating that it was okay to speak freely.

"The World Trade tower has been attacked."

"This has Bin Laden all over it," Tenet told Boren. "I've got to go."

The Mystery Engine Part in the Pentagon Photo

September 14, 2003

Official photographs taken at the 9-11 Pentagon crash site show what appears to be part of a small jet engine, but no one seems interested in identifying it. Due to the secrecy surrounding the 9-11 attack on the Pentagon and the lack of evidence that a large passenger jet smashed into the reinforced concrete and stone wall of the massive building, a host of conspiracy theories have cropped up. A photograph from the crash site could easily settle the debate, but no one seems to care.

A series of photographs taken by an official federal photographer at the Pentagon crash site show what appears to be an easily identifiable piece of a small-diameter turbofan engine. If the government wants to prove that a Boeing 757-200 crashed into the Pentagon, why is no one willing to identify which part from which engine this is?

The photographs show a part of a turbofan jet engine and were taken by Jocelyn Augustino, a photographer for the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA), at the Pentagon crash site on September 13, 2001. The round piece appears to be less than 3 feet in diameter and is propped up against what appears to be part of the engine housing and thick pieces of insulating material.

A Boeing 757 has two large engines, which are about 9 feet in diameter and 12 feet in length. A Pratt & Whitney PW2043 engine, used on some 757 aircraft, has a fan tip diameter of 78.5 inches. Nothing this large is to be seen in the FEMA photographs. The photo ID numbers are 4414 and 4415 and can be seen online at: http://www.photolibrary.fema.gov/photolibrary/advancedsearch.do

The available evidence does not support the official version that a Boeing 757-200, with two large engines and massive landing gear, flew close to ground-level and smashed into the wall of the Pentagon. For example, passenger jet landing gear are heavy and durable, yet none were seen being removed from the Pentagon. On the other hand, military personnel were photographed removing from the crash site a large light-weight object shrouded by a blue tarp. What was under the tarp and why was it kept hidden?

Five photographs taken from a video camera on the grounds of the Pentagon show a small white object approaching the Pentagon and a massive explosion, yet no plane is seen. Conspiracy theorists ask: If a 155 foot-long, 60-ton Boeing 757 caused the explosion at the Pentagon, why does it not appear in the photographs? And where is the debris that would have resulted from its impact with the limestone clad concrete wall?

One of the eyewitnesses at the Pentagon told the Washington Post that the plane he saw was small: “Steve Patterson, who lives in Pentagon City, said it appeared to him that a commuter jet swooped over Arlington National Cemetery and headed for the Pentagon…

“He said the plane, which sounded like the high-pitched squeal of a fighter jet…appeared to hold about eight to 12 people.”

For those who say a smaller plane or unmanned drone, such as a Global Hawk, was involved in the Pentagon attack, identifying the engine part in the photo could prove what kind of aircraft hit the building. The Global Hawk is a singe-engine drone that uses a Rolls Royce Allison engine hand-built in Indianapolis, Indiana. The AE3007H engine has a diameter of 43.5 inches. The unmanned Global Hawk, using a satellite guidance system, is capable of landing within 12 inches of its programmed destination.

Because the Global Hawk is a surveillance drone, the engine is contained in a heavily insulated housing to be extremely quiet. This corresponds with eyewitness reports. I asked eyewitness Steve Riskus, who said he was within 100 feet of the aircraft, what he heard. He said he “did not recall hearing anything.” If a 757 or jet fighter flew at high speed 100 feet from an eyewitness the roar would be deafening.

I also contacted the U.S. Air Force, American Airlines, Rolls Royce in Indianapolis, and others to ask for help identifying the part, but no one is willing to discuss the photographs. In several cases the spokesmen were ready to provide a statement before even seeing the photos.

John W. Brown from Rolls Royce said, “It is not a part from any Rolls Royce engine that I’m familiar with, and certainly not the AE3007H made here in Indy.”

Capt. Roger Burdette (USAF) from Arnold AFB, Tenn., said: “After considering your request, I’ve decided that it’s not in our best interest here at Arnold to speculate about this unidentified part. My main concern is that if, as you suggested, two Global Hawks were missing, the Air Force would officially investigate the disappearances.”

Col. Alvina Mitchell, Air Force spokesman at the Pentagon, said, “There are many issues with photos,” suggesting they may not be authentic. For “legal reasons” she could not respond to any questions. Mitchell said questions regarding Global Hawk should be sent to Sue Baker at the Aeronautical Systems Center at Wright Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, where the Global Hawk program is headquartered. Baker, however, was unable to answer any questions regarding the photos.

I then turned to the Federation of American Scientists (FAS) in Washington. FAS is known to have access to many scientists and data concerning U.S. military hardware. Josh Kellar at FAS, however, said the organization did not have any personnel who could identify the basic parts of a jet engine like the ones in the photo. In a written response, Kellar rejected the theory that anything other than a hijacked passenger jet hit the Pentagon: “I think the secrecy surrounding the 9-11 investigation and the enormous gravity of the attack itself have spawned a number of conspiracy theories, but there is a massive body of evidence that leaves no doubt as to what the actual cause of the devastation at the World Trade Center and Pentagon was: they were hit by hijacked passenger jets.”

But Josh at the FAS could not say what part of a 757 engine is seen in the photograph from the Pentagon.

Fox News Tries to Smear Bollyn

September 25, 2003

When Fox News asked to interview me on September 25 about 9-11, I suspected an ulterior motive. Within minutes the ulterior motive was revealed when Alan Colmes switched the subject to the number of Jews killed in World War 2, and asked me what I believed. Fox News and the controlled media are clearly trying to marginalize independent 9-11 research.

The Alan Colmes show is produced by Joel Kaufman for Rupert Murdoch’s Fox News radio network and reaches a large listening audience across the United States. Lisa Magalnick Jacknow, an assistant producer, contacted me and said they were interested in evidence that officials of the U.S. government were complicit in the 9-11 attacks. Familiar with the attack-style “journalism” of Fox News and knowing that Rupert Murdoch is an ardent supporter of the “war on terror,” I found it hard to believe that Fox News was seriously looking for evidence of high-level complicity. After all, Fox is said to be the favorite channel at the Bush White House.

Colmes was clearly more interested in labeling me as anti-Semitic than in hearing what I had to say about 9-11. An outraged listener called in to protest Colmes' “bait-and-switch” tactic and blatant attempt to smear me. Colmes told the caller, “You have an agenda too.”

Colmes asked what evidence I had that senior officials had prior knowledge of the attacks. I said that the fact that President George W. Bush calmly read a book about a goat to school children in Florida for a half-hour after hearing that a second plane had struck the World Trade Center was suspicious behavior for the chief executive of a nation in the middle of the worst terror attack in history. While Bush read the story about the goat, Vice President Dick Cheney was “in charge” in the president’s emergency control bunker, according to Secretary of Transportation Norman Y. Mineta.

Mineta’s testimony before a congressional investigative panel of what he witnessed in the president’s bunker on 9-11 is essential reading to understanding the allegations of official complicity.

On May 23, Mineta testified about Cheney’s actions in the bunker. Mineta said he arrived at the Presidential Emergency Operating Center (PEOC) at 9:20 a.m. where he observed the Vice President in charge.

When I presented Secretary Mineta’s testimony to Colmes he said it was “hearsay”.

Colmes asked about evidence of prior knowledge, but was not interested in the fact that 11 foreign intelligence agencies warned the responsible U.S. government agencies of an imminent attack prior to 9-11. He was clearly more interested in smearing me as an “anti-Semite.”

When I countered saying that Rupert Murdoch, the owner of Fox News, had financed and produced a television show called The Lone Gunmen, in which the March 4, 2001 pilot episode depicted the exact scenario of the 9-11 attacks on the World Trade Center, Colmes had nothing to say.

Did Rupert Murdoch Have Prior Knowledge of 9-11?

October 3, 2003

A year before 9-11, Rupert Murdoch of Fox News produced a television program that depicted a passenger aircraft being hijacked by remote control and flown into the World Trade Center. Did Rupert Murdoch have prior knowledge of 9-11?

Two organizations, both pro-Israel, the Anti Defamation League (ADL) and the Fox News network, have desperately tried to smear me as an “anti-Semite” in order to discredit and diminish the significance of my 9-11 work. At the helm of both organizations, the ADL and Fox News, is the Australian-born Zionist named Keith Rupert Murdoch. Murdoch and the ADL are clearly trying to marginalize me and other independent researchers who use facts to challenge the government’s flawed explanation of what occurred on 9-11. The question is why?

More than a year before 9-11, media mogul Rupert Murdoch produced a television program that depicted a passenger aircraft being hijacked by remote control and flown into the World Trade Center. A chief of the international Zionist network, Murdoch has close and long-standing relations with the individuals who gained control of the twin towers shortly before they were destroyed. One question has to be asked: Did Rupert Murdoch have prior knowledge of 9-11?

Rupert Murdoch is said to be television’s “most powerful man in the world with the capacity to reach more than 110 million viewers across four continents.” Murdoch sits at the helm of News Corp., the parent company of Fox News network, and controls a large part of the mass media in the United States, including the New York Post and the Fox cinema and television network. Murdoch’s international media network owns more than 175 newspapers and magazines on three continents, publishes 40 million papers a week and dominates the newspaper markets in Britain, Australia, and New Zealand.

A “close friend” of the accused Israeli war criminal and prime minister Ariel Sharon, Murdoch and his media network are well known for supporting Israel’s right-wing Likud Party and the Anglo-American “war on terror.” Less well known, however, is the fact that Murdoch produced a television program in 2000, which predicted with uncanny accuracy the attacks of 9-11. Murdoch also has long-standing relationships with the key individuals who gained possession of the World Trade Center shortly before 9-11 – and who profited from its destruction.

In 2000, Murdoch produced a television program about a terror attack on the World Trade Center, which predicted precisely the kind of attack that occurred on 9-11. He is also closely connected to the two individuals who leased and insured the WTC property – and their future earnings – against precisely such an attack. These connections and circumstances suggest that Murdoch had a considerable degree of prior knowledge of the attacks on the World Trade Center. Repeated calls to Murdoch’s office to inquire about what he may have known or suspected about the possibility of such an attack were not returned.

THE LONE GUNMEN

On March 4, 2001, Fox TV, a branch of Murdoch’s media empire, broadcast the pilot episode of a “spin-off” series based on characters from the popular Fox program X-Files. The short-lived series was called The Lone Gunmen. A Murdoch-owned company called Canadian Millennium Productions, Ltd. (News Corp. owns 83 percent), produced the pilot episode in Vancouver, Canada, and New York City from March 20 to April 7, 2000. The Lone Gunmen supposedly refers to a Washington-based government watchdog news weekly. The main characters are the investigative reporters who produce the paper.

The pilot episode depicted the hijacking of a passenger aircraft by a hostile computer hacker who takes control of the plane computer flight system and directs it to fly into one of the towers of the World Trade Center. The climactic sequence shows the plane heading straight for one of the twin towers, but thanks to the efforts of the crew of The Lone Gunmen and the powerful “Octium” computer chip, the pilots are able to regain control of the plane at the last second and avoid the building by inches. The pilots do not swerve away from the tower but pull the plane up in a steep climb. In a memorable scene full of tension the plane narrowly misses the tower.

The background footage for the plane’s approach to the WTC was actually filmed during the spring of 2000 by a special aerial crew that used a helicopter flying low over Manhattan on a night flight toward the twin towers. Despite the uncanny similarities between the Murdoch-produced film and the horrific reality of 9-11, rather than being discussed in the media as a prescient warning of the possibility of such an attack, the pilot episode of The Lone Gunmen seems to have been quietly forgotten. While an estimated 13.2 million Fox TV viewers reportedly watched the pilot episode of “The Lone Gunmen”, broadcast on March 4, 2001, when life imitated art six months later on 9-11, no one in the media seemed to recall the program.

"NO ONE NOTICED"

“I woke up on September 11 and saw it on TV and the first thing I thought of was The Lone Gunmen,” Frank Spotnitz, one of the program’s four executive producers said. “But then in the weeks and months that followed, almost no one noticed the connection.”

Frank Spotnitz, John Shiban, Vince Gilligan, and Chris Carter are listed as executive producers of the program. Shiban is also listed as a writer and creator of the pilot episode. “What’s disturbing about it to me is, you think as a fiction writer that if you can imagine this scenario, then the people in power in the government who are there to imagine disaster scenarios can imagine it, too,” Spotnitz said.

I spoke with Robert McLachlan, director of photography, who received an award from the Canadian Society of Cinematographers on March 31, 2001 for his camera work on the pilot episode. “It was odd that nobody referenced it,” McLachlan said about the uncanny similarities between The Lone Gunmen pilot episode he filmed and the horrific reality of 9-11. “You’re the first person who mentioned it,” he said. “In the ensuing press nobody mentioned that [9-11] echoed something that had been seen before.”

I asked McLachlan about who supervised the production of the pilot program. “John Shiban was primarily the creator,” McLachlan said, adding, “Chris Carter was not there.” Carter is well known for his production of the X-Files. “It’s their baby,” Carter said about The Lone Gunmen. Carter reportedly had “a minor part” in the production. Neither Carter nor Shiban could be reached for comment.

MURDOCH’S JEWISH ROOTS

Murdoch “became an American citizen for business reasons,” according to Richard H. Curtiss, editor of the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. Keith Rupert was born in Melbourne, Australia, on March 11, 1931. “Rupert’s father, Sir Keith Murdoch, was a newspaper publisher, and his mother an Orthodox Jew,” Curtiss wrote, “although Murdoch never offers that information in his biographies.”

Murdoch’s father married Elisabeth Joy Greene, daughter of Rupert Greene in 1928. They had one son, Keith Rupert, and three daughters. Later in life, Keith Rupert chose to use Rupert, the first name of his Jewish maternal grandfather. The young Keith Rupert was educated at Australia’s fashionable Geelong private school, and went on to the elitist and aristocratic Oxford University in England, according to Candour magazine (UK).

“Rupert’s father Sir Keith Murdoch attained his prominent position in Australian society through a fortuitous marriage to the daughter of a wealthy Jewish family, née Elisabeth Joy Greene. Through his wife’s connections, Keith Murdoch was subsequently promoted from reporter to chairman of the British-owned newspaper where he worked. There was enough money to buy himself a knighthood of the British realm, two newspapers in Adelaide, South Australia, and a radio station in a faraway mining town,” Candour wrote in 1984. “For some reason, Murdoch has always tried to hide the fact that his pious mother brought him up as a Jew.” While Murdoch may have “tried to hide” his Jewish roots, he has been quite forthright about his support for extreme right-wing Zionists, such as Benjamin Netanyahu and Ariel Sharon.

Netanyahu, who wrote a book entitled The War on Terror: How the West Can Win in 1986, is a frequent commentator on Murdoch’s Fox News. Murdoch’s support for Zionism extremists is well known and a matter of record. As New York Governor George Pataki said, “There is no newspaper in the U.S. more supportive of Israel than the [Murdoch’s] New York Post.”

It is through a network of Zionist organizations, in which he plays a central role, that Murdoch is connected to the individuals who arranged the privatization – and obtained control of the World Trade Center – shortly before its destruction. The key individuals are: Larry Silverstein and the former Israeli commando Frank Lowy, the lease holders of dubious repute who gained control of the WTC property six weeks before 9-11, and Port Authority Chairman Lewis M. Eisenberg, who oversaw the transfer of the leases.

Murdoch belongs to, and has been honored by, a number of leading Zionist organizations in which Silverstein, Lowy, and Eisenberg all hold senior positions. These organizations include the Anti-Defamation League of B'nai B'rith (ADL), the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), and the New York-based Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust.

Fifty days before 9-11, Silverstein Properties and Lowy’s WestfieldAmerica secured 99-year leases on the WTC. The Port Authority of New York and New Jersey turned control of the World Trade Center over to the private hands of Silverstein and Lowy on July 24, 2001. Silverstein and Lowy then took control of the 10.6 million-square-foot complex, which included the twin towers office buildings and two nine-story office buildings. Silverstein and the former Israeli commando Lowy then controlled all access to the World Trade Center. Lowy leased the shopping concourse called the Mall at the World Trade Center, which comprised about 427,000 square feet of retail space.

“Six weeks before the WTC towers were destroyed, the Port Authority completed the process of leasing them for 99 years to Larry Silverstein, the developer who had built 7 World Trade Center [which was demolished at 5:25 p.m. on 9-11]. Simultaneously, the retail space underneath the complex was leased to Westfield America, the U.S. division of an Australian company that is one of the world’s largest operators of shopping malls.” Paul Goldberger wrote in New Yorker of May 20, 2002. “Silverstein and Westfield were given the right to rebuild the structures if they were destroyed, and Westfield has the right to expand the retail space by 30 percent,” Goldberger wrote.

Silverstein is suing for some $7.2 billion in insurance money for the loss of the destroyed World Trade Center – and his expected earnings – for property he had leased with a down payment of $100 million – of borrowed funds.

MURDOCH THE ZIONIST

“Murdoch is a close friend of Ariel Sharon,” Sam Kiley, The Times (UK) veteran journalist on the Middle East wrote about the man who took over the once famous British paper. Kiley said Murdoch’s friendship with the Israeli prime minister had caused senior staff at the paper to rewrite important copy. “Murdoch’s executives were so afraid of irritating him that, when I pulled off a little scoop of tracking down and photographing the unit in the Israeli army which killed Mohammed al-Durrah, the 12-year-old boy whose death was captured on film and became the iconic image of the conflict, I was asked to file the piece ‘without mentioning the dead kid.’” Kiley wrote. “After that conversation, I was left wordless, so I quit.”

Sharon and Murdoch are old friends. On Oct. 15, 1982, a month after the massacres of thousands of Palestinian refugees in the Sabra and Shatila camps of Beirut, war crimes which occurred under Sharon’s direct command, the Israeli defense minister held meetings with Rupert Murdoch and others, reportedly in order to advance his “West Bank real estate grab.” The visit with Sharon included a trip for Murdoch and his editors from New York and London that “took them on a bird’s-eye tour of Israel aboard a helicopter gunship, flying over the Golan Heights, West Bank and settlements.”

“I have always believed in the future of Israel and the goals of the international Jewish community,” Murdoch said at a spring fund-raiser for the Museum of Jewish Heritage - A Living Memorial to the Holocaust on April 29, 2001. From the beginning, News Corp., his global media company, “has been supportive of the Jewish national cause,” Murdoch said.

Larry Silverstein, who had not yet acquired the lease on the World Trade Center, attended the fund-raiser with Murdoch and reportedly said about museum chairman Robert Morgenthau’s plans to expand the museum: “I’ll support you…as long as you keep it under 110 stories.”

MURDOCH & THE ADL

“Henry Kissinger, Rupert Murdoch, and Mortimer Zuckerman are on the [ADL] dinner committee,” according to a recent New York Times report on the ADL’s recent fund-raiser in which the controversial Italian prime minister Silvio Berlusconi received the ADL’s Distinguished Statesman Award.

Silverstein and Eisenberg have both held senior leadership positions with the United Jewish Appeal (UJA), a billion dollar Zionist “charity” organization, to which Murdoch and Lowy generously contribute. In 1997, Henry Kissinger presented Murdoch with the UJA’s award for “Humanitarian of the Year.” Silverstein is a former chairman of UJA. This organization raises hundreds of millions of dollars every year for a network of Zionist agencies in the United States and Israel. Eisenberg, who was instrumental in obtaining the lease for Silverstein, is on the Planning Board of UJA. Eisenberg in his role with the Port Authority was the key person who negotiated the 99-year leases for Silverstein and Frank Lowy’s Westfield America, who were, in fact, the low-bidders for the lease on the 110-story towers and the retail mall.

Murdoch and the Czechoslovakian-born Israeli commando Frank Lowy, a former fighter in Israel’s Golani Brigade, who emigrated to Australia in the 1950s, have had a long friendship, which Murdoch recounted during an American Australian Association fund-raising dinner in honor of Frank’s son, Peter S. Lowy, in New York on November 20, 2002. Larry Silverstein and his wife also attended the American Australian event. Some reporters refer to the American Australian Association, whose membership includes James Wolfensohn, the president of the World Bank, who raised cash for Rupert Murdoch when he first expanded into the United States, as “the kangaroo mafia.”

“Frank was a brave and determined fighter,” Rafi Kocer, Lowy’s former commander, said. Lowy has donated some $350,000 to build a memorial museum in Israel for his former brigade. Today, Lowy and his three sons control Westfield Corporation, one of the largest operators of shopping centers in the United States – and the world.

INSURED AGAINST TERRORIST ATTACKS

On September 12, 2001, the Jerusalem Post reported: “Frank Lowy, who emigrated to Australia from Israel in 1952, owns the 99-year lease for the 425,000 square foot retail portion of the destroyed World Trade Center…Westfield said today that it has insurance cover against terrorist attacks and its earnings will not be materially affected.” Lowy, is described by the Sydney Morning Herald as “a self-made man with a strong interest in the Holocaust and Israeli politics.”

Is the Pentagon Mystery Disc from a Global Hawk?

October 12, 2003

An official FEMA photograph reveals a crucial piece of evidence, which if positively identified, could prove what kind of aircraft hit the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001.

Several readers have suggested that the unidentified disc was a piece from the Auxiliary Power Unit (APU) mounted in the tail section of a Boeing 757. Honeywell makes the GTCP331-200 APU used on the 757 aircraft. No one, however, claimed that the small disc was a piece from one of the main engines of a 757-200.

I contacted Honeywell’s Aerospace division in Phoenix, Ariz., and sent high-resolution photos for their examination. “There’s no way that’s an APU wheel,” an expert at Honeywell said. The expert, who cannot be named, added: “That turbine disc—there’s no way in the world that came out of an APU.”

I also contacted Pratt & Whitney and Rolls Royce, manufacturers of the 757’s turbofan jet engines to try and identify the piece. “If the aircraft that struck the Pentagon was a Boeing 757-200 owned by American Airlines, then it would have to be a Rolls Royce engine,” Mark Sullivan, spokesman for Pratt & Whitney, said.

John W. Brown, spokesman for Rolls Royce (Indianapolis), said, “It is not a part from any Rolls Royce engine that I’m familiar with, and certainly not the AE 3007H made here in Indy.” The AE 3007 engines are used in small commuter jets such as the Cessna Citation; the AE 3007H is also used in the military’s unmanned aircraft, the Global Hawk. The Global Hawk is manufactured by Northrop Grumman’s subsidiary Ryan Aeronautical, which it acquired from Teledyne, Inc. in July 1999.

If the government version that an American Airlines 757-200 hit the Pentagon is accurate, then the object in the photo should be a part of a Rolls Royce RB211-535 turbofan engine. When I told Brown that it must be a piece of a Rolls Royce engine, Brown balked and asked who at Pratt & Whitney had provided the information.

Asked again if the disc in the photo is a piece of a Rolls Royce RB211-535, or from the AE 3007 series, Brown said he could not answer. I asked Brown if he was actually familiar with the parts of an AE 3007H, which is made at the Indiana plant: “No,” Brown said. “I don’t build the engines. I am a spokesman for the company. I speak for the company.”

Rolls Royce produces the RB211-535 engines for American Airlines 757-200 aircraft at a plant in Derby, England. Martin Johnson, head of communications at Rolls Royce in Derby, said he had followed my story closely and had been notified in advance by Rolls Royce offices in Seattle and Indianapolis. Rather than address the question of the unidentified disc, however, Johnson launched a verbal attack on me for questioning the government version of events at the Pentagon on 9-11. “You are the only person in the world who does not believe that a 757 hit the Pentagon,” Johnson said, “The idea that we can have a reasonable conversation is beyond your wildest dreams,” he said and hung up the phone.

Flug Revue, a German magazine about aviation equipment was more willing to discuss the disc. Karl Schwarz, a technical editor at the Bonn-based publication, examined the photo and technical drawings of the RB211-535. “I think only an engineer who is involved in the design of the engine could identify the part,” Schwarz said.

While the front fan of the RB211-535 has a 74.5-inch diameter, compression discs inside the engine are much smaller. Schwarz said the inner discs are between 29 and 41 inches in diameter. “It could well be” an inner compression disc, Schwarz said. The discs from the inner stages are made of titanium, he added. I asked Schwarz if this could be a disc from a smaller engine, such as the Global Hawk’s AE 3007H. “It could come from any jet engine,” Schwarz said.

If the disc in the photo can be matched with a Rolls Royce AE 3007H engine, it would prove something like a Global Hawk hit the Pentagon. The Global Hawk engine is hand built at the Rolls Royce plant in Indianapolis and has an opening diameter of 43.5 inches. Schwarz said he did not have a technical diagram of an AE 3007 engine to consult.

Because the disc in the photo appears very similar in size and shape to the front fan of a Global Hawk engine, I asked Schwarz in what position is the solid disc found behind the front fan of a turbofan engine. “Immediately,” Schwarz said.

An unnamed former cruise missile engineer for the engine manufacturer Teledyne Continental Motors-Turbine Engines said, “Clearly, the part in the picture is larger than 24 inches in diameter. It also appears to have a nosepiece-like device on its front. This probably houses bearings, front oil sump and perhaps an alternator or starter.”

“This fan did not come from a cruise missile engine,” the engineer concluded.

Bush on 9-11: Out of the loop?

October 17, 2003

As 9-11, “the Pearl Harbor of the 21st century,” unfolded in New York and Washington the president remained conspicuously “out of the loop” - in Florida. When the United States was attacked on the morning of 9-11, after two passenger planes had already crashed into the World Trade Center and with two other rogue aircraft approaching Washington, President George W. Bush continued with a pre-planned photo session in a Florida elementary school. Bush’s rather bizarre actions on that fateful morning raise a number of serious questions.

“It was clear that we were under attack. Why didn’t the Secret Service whisk [Bush] out of that school?” Kristen Breitweiser, a relative of a 9-11 victim asked on the Phil Donahue television show. “[Bush] is the commander-in-chief of the United States of America, our country was clearly under attack, it was after the second building was hit. I want to know why he sat there for 25 minutes,” Breitweiser said.

In an article, “An Interesting Day: President Bush’s Movements and Actions on 9-11,” published in May 2003 on the website of the Center for Cooperative Research (CCR), Allan Wood and Paul Thompson ask: “Why, at 9:03 a.m. - fifteen minutes after it was clear the United States was under terrorist attack - did President Bush sit down with a classroom of second-graders and begin a 20-minute pre-planned photo op?”

In an effort to “document the historical record” CCR provides well-documented 9-11 timelines on-line, including that of the president, at: www.cooperativeresearch.net. The following timeline is based on documented sources, primarily major newspaper and television reports.

Sunrise on September 11, 2001 found Bush at the Colony Beach and Tennis Resort on Longboat Key, Florida, where he had spent the night. Surface-to-air missiles had been placed on the roof of the resort for the occasion.

At 6:30 a.m., Bush, a reporter friend and his Secret Service crew took a four-mile jog in the half-light of dawn, according to the Washington Post.

At 8:00 a.m. Bush sat for his daily intelligence briefing. “The President’s briefing appears to have included some reference to the heightened terrorist risk reported throughout the summer,” the Telegraph (UK) reported, but contained nothing serious enough to call National Security Adviser Condoleezza Rice.

At 8:20, as the briefing ended, Boston flight control realized that Flight 11 had probably been hijacked, but didn’t notify other flight control centers for another five minutes, and didn’t notify the Air Force’s NORAD until some 20 minutes later. “There doesn’t seem to have been alarm bells going off, traffic controllers getting on with law enforcement or the military,” ABC News reported three days later. “There’s a gap there that will have to be investigated.”

At 8:35 a.m. Bush’s motorcade left the Colony Beach resort for Emma E. Booker Elementary School in Sarasota, Florida. At 8:46 a.m., as Flight 11 slammed into the north tower of the World Trade Center (WTC), Bush’s motorcade was crossing the John Ringling Causeway on the way to Booker School. Sarasota Magazine reported that Bush was on Highway 301, when he was informed that a plane had crashed into the WTC. A news photographer, Eric Draper, who was in the motorcade with Press Secretary Ari Fleischer, said he overheard Fleischer say on a cell phone, “Oh, my God, I don’t believe it. A plane just hit the World Trade Center.” In his evening address to the nation on 9-11, Bush said: “Immediately following the first attack, I implemented our government’s emergency response plans.”

“Whatever these plans were, they don’t seem to involve scrambling aircraft at this time,” Thompson wrote on the “Bush on 9-11” timeline published by CCR.

A few minutes after the 8:46 crash, CIA Director Tenet was told of the crash as he ate breakfast in a Washington hotel with former Senator David Boren (D-Okla.). Tenet was told the WTC had been attacked by an airplane: “I was struck by the fact that [the messenger] used the word attacked,” Boren said.

By 8:48 a.m. the first news reports appeared on TV and radio that a plane had crashed into the WTC. At 8:55 a.m. Bush’s motorcade arrived at Booker Elementary School. Just before 9:00 a.m. as Bush entered Booker Elementary School, Bush advisor Karl Rove reportedly rushed up, took Bush aside in a corridor, and told him about the calamity. Rove says the cause of the crash was unclear. Bush replied, “What a horrible accident!” according to the photographer Draper.

However, in a later recollection, Bush said it was chief of staff Andrew Card who first informed him saying: “Here’s what you’re going to be doing; you’re going to meet so-and-so, such-and-such.’ And Andy Card says, ‘By the way, an aircraft flew into the World Trade Center.’”

Others reported that just after Bush arrived at Booker he was whisked into a room and updated on the situation via telephone by National Security Advisor Rice.

School principal Gwen Tose-Rigell was reportedly summoned to talk with the President: “He said a commercial plane has hit the World Trade Center, and we’re going to go ahead and go on, we’re going on to do the reading thing anyway.”

Bush later made the following statement: “And I was sitting outside the classroom waiting to go in, and I saw an airplane hit the tower - the TV was obviously on, and I used to fly myself, and I said, ‘There’s one terrible pilot.’ And I said, ‘It must have been a horrible accident.’ But I was whisked off there - I didn’t have much time to think about it.”

A Boston Herald article later asked: “Think about that. Bush’s remark implies he saw the first plane hit the tower. But we all know that video of the first plane hitting did not surface until the next day. Could Bush have meant he saw the second plane hit - which many Americans witnessed? No, because he said that he was in the classroom when Card whispered in his ear that a second plane hit.”

The article pointed out that Bush had told the story more than once, and asked, “How could the commander-in-chief have seen the plane fly into the first building - as it happened?”

At 9:03 a.m. Flight 175 hit the south tower of the World Trade Center. Between 9:03 - 9:06 a.m. Bush was reportedly in Sandra Kay Daniels’ second-grade class for a photo-op to promote his education policies. He was introduced to the children and posed for pictures. The teacher then led the students through some reading exercises.

Bush later claimed that while he was doing this lesson, he thought about what he would say about the WTC crash: “I was concentrating on the program at this point, thinking about what I was going to say. Obviously, I felt it was an accident. I was concerned about it, but there were no alarm bells.”

At 9:06, as the children got their books from under their seats to read a story together, Chief of Staff Andrew Card told Bush of the second WTC crash. Card reportedly entered the room and whispered into his ear, “A second plane hit the other tower; America is under attack.” At this critical moment, Bush, the nation’s commander-in-chief did not leave the classroom, but stayed and listened as 16 Booker Elementary School second-graders took turns reading a story about a girl’s pet goat, called Pet Goat.

According to the Tampa Tribune, Bush picked up the book and read with the children “for eight or nine minutes.” In unison, the children read out loud, “The - Pet - Goat. A - girl - got - a - pet - goat. But - the - goat - did - some - things - that - made - the - girl’s - dad - mad.” Bush listened and asked the children a few questions. “Really good readers, whew!” the president said, “These must be sixth-graders!”

“DON’T SAY ANYTHING YET”

In the back of the room, Fleischer held up a pad of paper with instructions for the president: “DON’T SAY ANYTHING YET.” Meanwhile in Washington, Vice President Dick Cheney and Rice were taken to the underground bunker at the White House.

According to the Sarasota Sheriff Bill Balkwill, after Bush entered the classroom a Marine carrying Bush’s phone approached Balkwill and asked, “Can you get me to a television? We’re not sure what’s going on, but we need to see a television.”

Three Secret Service agents, a SWAT member, the Marine, and Balkwill turned on the television in a nearby front office just as Flight 175 crashes into the WTC. “We’re out of here,” the Marine tells Balkwill. “Can you get everyone ready?”

At 9:16 a.m., Bush left the classroom where he has been since about 9:03. On leaving Bush advised the children to stay in school and be good citizens. He also told the children, “Thank you all so very much for showing me your reading skills.”

Bush spoke with the school principal Gwen Tose-Rigell and went to an empty classroom to meet with his staff.

Between 9:16 and 9:29 a.m. Bush reportedly worked with his staff to prepare a speech. He watched some television coverage and spoke with Rice, Cheney, and New York Governor George Pataki.

At 9:29 a.m. Bush gave a brief speech to about 200 Booker students, teachers and reporters. He said, “Today we’ve had a national tragedy. Two airplanes have crashed into the World Trade Center in an apparent terrorist attack on our country.”

Thompson notes that Bush stayed at the school until 9:34 although “some of Bush’s security wanted him to leave the school immediately.” Bush remained at Booker School for 28 minutes after being informed of the second plane striking the WTC.

As he left the classroom a reporter asked, “Mr. President, are you aware of the reports of the plane crash in New York? Is there any...” An aide interrupted the reporter and said, “All right. Thank you. If everyone could please step outside.” Bush said, “We’ll talk about it later.”

At 9:34 a.m. Bush’s motorcade left Booker Elementary School for Sarasota-Bradenton International Airport. At 9:38 a.m. American Airlines Flight 77 reportedly crashed into the Pentagon.

A year later, Chief of Staff Andrew Card said, “As we were heading to Air Force One, we did hear about the Pentagon attack, and we also learned, what turned out to be a mistake, but we learned that the Air Force One package could in fact be a target.”

At 9:43 a.m. Bush’s motorcade arrived at Sarasota’s airport and approached Air Force One. Bush immediately boarded the plane. Security checks of all baggage delayed takeoff until 9:55. At about 9:56 a.m. Air Force One departed Saratoga airport, without military escort planes. “The object seemed to be simply to get the President airborne and out of the way,” an administration official said later.

In the air on Air Force One, Bush spoke with Cheney on the phone. Cheney reportedly recommended that Bush authorize the military to shoot down any plane under control of the hijackers. “You bet,” Bush later recalled saying.

“If this decision was so easy to make, why wasn’t it given earlier?” Thompson asks.

At this point Bush began his sojourn around the country on Air Force One. At the end of the day, Bush returned to Washington and addressed the nation.

At 11:30 p.m. before going to sleep, the Washington Post reported that Bush wrote in his diary, “The Pearl Harbor of the 21st century took place today. ... We think it’s Osama Bin Laden.”